Taking into consideration customer and partner requests, Microsoft will sell Windows XP for another 5 months

In a recent press release Microsoft announced it will extend sales of its Windows XP operating system to OEMs and retail channels for five months over the initial end date, through June 30, 2008. The move comes after a great amount of feedback from customers and partners regarding the original end-of-sale date of January 31, 2008.

Mike Nash, the corporate vice president of Windows Product Management, stated, "While we’ve been pleased with the positive response we’ve seen and
heard from customers using Windows Vista, there are some customers who
need a little more time to make the switch to Windows Vista."

Nash went on to say that Microsoft's original policy of a four-year availability of operating systems to OEM and retail channels had been established in 2002. However, due to the delays in the launch of Windows Vista, Microsoft felt that offering Windows XP for sale for an additional five months would make more sense.

When asked about what Microsoft was hearing in terms of feedback from customers regarding Windows Vista Nash stated, "With more than 60 million licenses sold as of this summer, Windows
Vista is on track to be the fastest-selling operating system in
Microsoft’s history."

Microsoft's Nash feels that the strong sales thus far are due to the doubling of sales of pre-built desktop and laptop computers bundled with Windows Vista as the primary OS. However, recently Microsoft also decided to offer OEMs theoption to let customers downgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP.

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Microsoft doesn't really suffer if you buy WinXP Pro instead of Vista Business, or WinXP Home instead of Vista Basic, or WinXP Media Center instead of Vista Home Premium because WinXP and Vista have the same pricing structure.

Companies are not really anxious to jump to a new OS when it comes out regardless of the OS itself. For example, my company was using Win2K Pro until WinXP SP1 came out. MS knows this and WinXP Pro "downgrade" from Vista Business has been on offer ever since Vista started shipping. Today we buy PCs with Vista licenses and stash away the keys until the company decides to move to Vista.

What's also funny is that when WinXP came out it was bashed for being the same thing as Win2K but with prettier UI and now people talk about WinXP as though it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction - when Windows "Seven" comes out in a few years Vista will be ruling the roost of consumer/business OSes and it will take some time for Windows "Seven" to surpass its predecessor in popularity.

XP was 2k's technology with an accessible, easy to understand user interface. vista is XP with essentially the same interface, features, and functionality, since all the cool stuff they announced years ago was cut from the final release.

to add injury to insult, vista is much less compatible than XP (to be expected from a new OS, granted), and consumes considerably more system resources. if you add to that the fact that even current high-end video cards struggle in DX10 gaming then you have no reason at all until MS irons out the bugs.

it was the same story with 98/98SE, and with XP/XP SP1. so i guess i'll wait until vista SP1 before i will upgrade.